recipe

On Monday night I threw my Shane a small surprise Rumdayillovo party. It’s his birthday today which means it’s pretty much impossible for us to go out because of Howl, so with Doug’s help I made prego rolls and potato wedges, hung up balloons with steamers, set-up a poker game and had our Rumday Illovo family over to surprise him. He was ALMOST surprised. Boo. He arrived home literally 10 minutes before everyone else arrived to shout the big ‘S’ word, but he appreciated it anyway. I also baked a batch of Oreo Cupcakes, that were damn delicious!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY SHANE, you are my best friend and I love you so so so much.

Good Lord, look at this amazing cake! My friend Clint always finds the coolest things like this and then mails me the link (he found Eyescream and Friends). He is the best at finding stuff that makes me want to backflip off a roof. I’m so so so going to try make this cake and when I do I will blog about the results, but for now check out these cool photos and read about how to make it. Here is a link back to the genius who actually made this in the first place – Victoria I’m sending you a virtual high-5, because your face and this cake flipping rule.

On Saturday afternoon I had a bit of a tea party at our flat. I baked some vegan cookies, set out some of my most colourful china and invited some friends over. I haven’t seen these 3 faces in one room all together for a while, so I was super happy to have them all at my house.

We tried out some teas from a lovely lady who came to see me the other day about her productLady Bonin’s Tea Parlour.She left me some samples and the girls and I tucked into them on Saturday. The tea was fragrant and really nice, subtle but nice and they complimented the super sweetness of my cookies well. I’m getting some of this tea into Wolves soon, you must come try it out if you like.

I love baking, I love cooking too, but baking is my most favourite thing to do. I love it when a recipe comes together and I make something that looks as good as it tastes, which is not always the case, sometimes the things I try to make belly flop like no someones business and then I never touch the recipe again, but when I stumble on a winner I make sure I have it written down and saved.

I went online and ordered a few new baking books for myself. I tried to research them a bit before I pushed ‘add to cart ‘, but I think I may have been a bit more successful on some more than others.

So if you are looking for some nice books to keep your pudding compartment happy take a look at these.

1. Vintage Cakes

This is so far the book I’m enjoying the most, I have made 3 things out of it and all of them have come out really nicely. I just wish it had more pictures because I like to see what things are meant to look like, but it doesn’t. But it’s still a really cool book full of things that make you wish you could sleep face down in a cake every night. I would definitely recommend buying it.

2. The Back in The Day Cookbook

This is a sweet little book, it has good old fashioned recipes in it and it covers sweet and savoury. There are pies and cakes and biscuits and puddings and cobblers and it’s laid out nicely too. I would be scared to visit this bakery in real life in fear that I would never want to leave, it’s vintage and beautiful. This book also gets a thumbs up.

3. More from Magnolia

I also bought More from Magnolia, which is a book with recipes from a very famous bakery in America called Magnolia. This was the most disappointing visually. There are absolutely no pictures which really doesn’t inspire me to tackle any of the recipes inside. And they all seem so old fashion, but not in a good way. I haven’t even baked one thing from this book, which sucks because I could be completely wrong about it.

Do any of you own it and have a different opinion on it?

4. Loveless Cafe

The last book I bought was the Loveless Cafe, which is full of simple southern pies, puddings, cakes and cobblers from Nashville. This book is full of short and sweet recipes that don’t scare you when you are reading through them because they seem totally doable. The stuff is old fashioned, but it all looks so delicious. I’m happy with this one too and I think i’m going to enjoy it as much as the first and second one on this list.

The other day I bought this beautiful pale straight-out-the-70’s-green cake stand. It was quite pricey but I thought stuff it, if I was a cake I would want to live my short life on this piece of amazing.

I knew the first cake I was going to parade on it was a chocolate cake with salted caramel icing that I saw on this blog a while back and have been meaning to try out for ages. You see I’m in charge of making my friends Leigh and Brad’s wedding cakes for their shindig in September and this is one of the cakes I wanted to make. So I did and Leigh and Nick, who was Leigh’s stand-in-husband-to-be tried it out.

Ok, this is damn cool. Damn you clever people of the world who think of clever things like this that make me want to cry jealous tears.

– The first and only Cookbook you can actually read, cook and eat. Made out of 100% fresh pasta it can be opened, filled with ingredients and finally be cooked. Packaged as classic lasagna. The Cookbook was designed by German design agency Korefe as a special project for a large publishing house.